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Teamwork is the power behind the politically charged,
abstract art of IRWIN. Peter Hill reports.

What is the most exciting international exhibition in Melbourne
at the moment? Some might say the Andy Warhol Time
Capsules, but for my money it would have to be the IRWIN
collective from Slovenia at RMIT Gallery.

Who are IRWIN and what has brought their politically charged,
yet often humorous work to Australia?

To understand their work we have to go back to the 1980s, when
several art movements began steadily growing in importance but
never dominated the art world. One was the tendency for artists to
work in couples or groups, as rock bands have traditionally done;
another was for artists to create complex fictions; and a third was
the construction of organisational systems as "art".

The IRWIN group from Slovenia did all three. Their project
continues. To put it simply, they have created a fictive East
European state, which influenced the real break-up of the former
Yugoslavia, and their main weapon in all this was the iconic figure
of the artist Kasmir Malevich. He famously painted black squares on
canvas and these are rivalled only in price and rarity by blue
period Picassos. IRWIN, in humorous homage, superimposed a gigantic
black fabric square onto Moscow's Red Square. You can watch a
poignantly funny video of them doing this in one of RMIT's
galleries.

But be warned, there is so much going on in this space -
multiple slide projections, video loops, giant lightboxes and
competing sound tracks - that you might need to step outside to the
comparative calm of Swanston Street and chill out a bit.

Watching the swirls of students navigate the endless,
crisscrossing trams, I reflected that IRWIN really was in the
vanguard of the first groups of artists to work in teams. They were
predated by duos such as Gilbert and George, Ulay and Marina
Abramovich, and Anne and Patrick Poirier. But it was a floodgate
that was determined to open, and very soon identical twins Jane and
Louise Wilson, the Seymour Likely Group in Amsterdam, and more
recently The Leeds Thirteen in Britain filled the pages of
international magazines.

The current installation by IRWIN has already been seen in
Sydney and Adelaide but it does not mark the group's first visit to
Australia. The last time they were here, in 1988, the Berlin Wall
was still standing, and Nick Waterlow invited the group to his
landmark Australian Bicentenary Biennale, which was shown in Sydney
and Melbourne. Their work was seen in close proximity to the
blood-drenched installation of the Viennese Aktionist Hermann
Nitsch and the profoundly moving Aboriginal Ramingining Burial
Poles, which looked far better in an old wharf setting than they
ever have in the clinical surroundings of the National Gallery of
Australia in Canberra. (Some artworks look great in a "white cube",
others need the patina of time and memory.)

Since 1988, IRWIN has cultivated its own rich patina at the
edges of the international art world and at the centre of politics
in Eastern Europe. At times they have been lauded as art stars in
London's glossy colour supplements, and then they have slipped in
to obscurity, only to reinvent themselves one more time. One of the
strangest things in this delightfully archival installation is to
observe how they have all aged from zippy-looking, young turks in
black business suits to grey-haired men in late middle-age.

Nick Vickers, the director of Sydney University's Sir Hermann
Black Art Gallery, was pivotal in bringing them to Australia on
this occasion.

"The roots of the artist group IRWIN can be traced on an
aesthetic level to the godfather of abstraction Kasmir Malevich,"
Vickers says. "His geometric symbols recur time and again
throughout their images. The solid black cross, in the hands of
these inventive artists, becomes a political symbol, an
intervention and a stamp or logo for their earlier incarnation,
which was known as NSK, or Neue Slowenische Kunst."

Four artists from the IRWIN collective have been in Australia at
different times during the run of the various shows. They are Dusan
Mandic, Roman Uranjek, Andrej Savski and Miran Mohar.

The story of how they navigated their way through the Western
art world from a Cold War base in the then Eastern Bloc is at least
as bizarre as their work. I first met them in Edinburgh in the late
1980s. They had heard of the Scottish impresario Richard Demarco
and knew that he had given many artists around the world their
first international exhibition.

Miran Mohar got on the phone from Ljubljana and Demarco offered
them a show, so long as they could get to Edinburgh. Several
members of the group managed to hitch a lift on a military aircraft
and eventually made it to Scotland.

Following their success at the Edinburgh International Festival,
they were offered an exhibition at London's Riverside Studios,
which is where Nick Waterlow saw them and brought them to Australia
for the Bicentenary Biennale.

New York dealer Bess Cutler signed them up in Sydney and
launched their American careers at the Chicago Art Fair in
1989.

Later that year, I caught up with them in Los Angeles, at that
city's art fair. It was a month after the Berlin Wall had been
hammered flat in one of the world's greatest popular uprisings, and
IRWIN was being chauffeured around California in a stretch
limousine supplied by the group's gallery.

The last I saw of them, they had instructed their driver to take
them on an epic road-trip to Mexico.